Fantasy / Literary

Nothing Spoils a Memory Like the Truth

Thirteen-year-old Ezekiel is an anxious adolescent, for whom scientific testing reveals the distressing prediction of a long but loveless life.

Too bad for Ezekiel, since even the smell of a female sends a shock straight to his underpants.

So, in Jenny Drummey’s novel “Unrequited” he decides he must convince his shrewish mother to let him travel, to visit the one person who can prove that terrible prophecy wrong: his stepmother.

Ezekiel’s distant father Joe and his new wife Charlotte are caretakers at the Little Red Inn, where fans of a mediocre children’s author gather. Joe attempts to give his son The Talk during a New Year’s visit, while Ezekiel, obsessed with his stepmother, seeks the proof that his life will not, after all, be empty of affection.

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The Indie Author Life

If you find your own book funny (and I do) you will occasionally have difficulty getting through a section without reenacting a blooper reel. I had to read this part, describing a middle school teacher tasked with teaching Sex Ed, at least three times:

Mr. Gorey didn’t watch television or movies. Mostly he obsessed over his boring collections: safety pins, scraps of wallpaper, and bus transfers. At least that ate up some time.

With the invention of the Internet a few years later, Norman Gorey would find his tiny niche, and wedge himself comfortably into it like some vulnerable undersea worm, backing into a snug shell.

In the recording studio, an animal may wander around (say a cat). This cat may, occasionally, scratch at the cubicle walls surrounding the recording area erected to deaden the sound (or enliven the sound, I am not sure which). Said cat can be scared off with the shake of a tambourine. (Note to cat owners – a tambourine is a friendlier deterrent than a squirt from a water bottle.)